DISHFIRE: The Program That Lets the NSA Capture Almost 200 Million Texts a Day

New documents provided by Edward Snowden, and investigated on by the UK's Channel 4News and The Guardian, reveal that the NSA has a program called Dishfire that can collect "pretty much everything it can." The files handed over by Snowden reveal a key NSA presentation in 2011 that shows Dishfire was able to collect a mean of 194 million SMS text messages every day in April. In the presentation, they referred to the collection as "a goldmine to exploit." The agency can also gather location data, contacts, and financial transactions of users—even if they aren't suspected of doing anything illegal—through the program. Once Dishfire gets grabs these messages, they are analyzed by a service called Prefer, which then gives the agency a detailed report.

The NSA has also helped the British spy agency GCHQ, by letting them search the data of "untargeted and unwarranted” messages of British citizens.